The man charged with protecting the Government from cyber-attacks has become the latest member of the intelligence community to join a Cambridge cyber security start-up.

Andrew France, OBE, has left a senior
position at GCHQ to become chief executive of Darktrace.

France spent thirty
years at the Government spying agency, rising to the position of Deputy
Director of Cyber Defence Operations. In that role, which he left at Christmas,
France was charged with protecting Government data and critical national
infrastructure from cyber-attacks.

France was introduced to Darktrace by the
company’s then managing director Stephen Huxter, another former senior figure
within the Government’s cyber defence team.

The company’s executive committee
boasts several other civil service veterans with experience in cyber defence
and former MI5 director-general Sir Jonathan Evans also sits on Darktrace’s
board.

GCHQ has been at the heart of the Edward
Snowden leaks and been widely criticised for spying on internet activity, but
France denied that his new role was an example of ‘poacher-turned-gamekeeper’.

“What people don’t realise is GCHQ has got
two arms,” France said. “There are the people who collect the intelligence and
the people who protect it, and that’s where I come from. I’m poacher turned
poacher.

Commenting on the recent revelations about
GCHQ, France said: “I don’t believe
people appreciate how much scrutiny GCHQ is under already. Is it enough?
There’s public debate to be had about that. A balance has to be struck, but in
my view I think the UK has got it about right.”

Darktrace, founded last September, plants
‘honey pots’ in networks that allow it to detect and monitor intrusions rather
than simply trying to block them out. The company’s software is based on
mathematical research carried out at Cambridge University and Autonomy founder
Mike Lynch has invested $20 million in the company through his Invoke Capital
fund.

France called Darktrace’s technology a
“ground breaking, gear-shift moment”, adding: “The traditional cyber security
industry have all got hammers and they’re all looking for nails to hit – that
just doesn’t work in 2014.”

France said he would not exploit his
Government links to win business for Darktrace, saying: “Government will be
interested for obvious reasons, but we’re going where the problem is and the
problem is with enterprises, who’ve got compromised networks that they’ve never
been able to clean up.

“The interest from the commercial world is
outpacing us – we don’t have to go chasing a government contract.”

France said companies were facing growing
threats from cybercrime, nation states and hacktivists, and said at GCHQ he had
seen “the damage being done to the country on an economic level from cyber
attacks”.

“If you look at the UK, our national wealth
isn’t in the things that we make, it’s in the data we hold, i.e. financial
markets and things like that.”

Darktrace currently looks at internet
traffic, but France said it would soon be moving into industrial systems, a
form of cyber-attack synonymous with the Stuxnet attack that targeted Iran’s
nuclear programme in 2010.

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